Painting The Town: Eric Peyret's paintings of Dubai

Visual art as a form of expression is probably just as old as human kind itself. Today, some decide to take pictures using modern technologies while others stick with the more traditional of ways… Eric Peyret’s talent is capturing the narrative essence of a place by painting it on canvas. As he wanders through different cities, Peyret paints their bright nights, roads, metro rails, billboards, and everything that defines them. His latest paintings are of the urban scape of Dubai.

Born in Pau, France in 1964, Eric Peyret is a graduate of the Higher Institute of Decorative Painting in Paris. He began his career as an artist with the production of large-format murals on wall panels in Italy, the Middle East, Australia, Brazil and the United States. However, since 1998, he has been devoted to painting on canvas.

Peyret’s love of classical and contemporary architecture inspired him to turn to more personal work in which he seeks a combination of more realistic figuration and a geometric abstraction induced by the theme. He treats urban life as one might have treated the ideal city during the Renaissance, by adding humanity through colour, atmosphere and balance without necessarily having the explicit presence of people.

His moves about cities is an attempt to build links between figuration and certain type of geometric abstraction showing the parallelism between urban structure, human urban structures and human intern structure, the interactions between the people and their urban environment. From the traditional concept of the ideal city of Italian Renaissance, Peyret wants to show the city as an objective object of beauty in which one can travel between shapes, volumes, graphic elements, lights and shadows, horizontal and vertical dimensions. His work is tribute to people and the culture in which they live.

Throughout July 2014, Eric Peyret will be exhibiting his latest work at Fann-À-Porter Art Gallery located in the lobby area of the Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates. “Fann-À-Porter”, which translates as “art-to-go”, launched its gallery space in Dubai earlier this year with the goal of bringing a host of international talent to display their collections on a monthly basis with a full year calendar in 2014/15.